The ESIP Information Technology and Interoperability (IT&I) Committee proposes the development of a suite of metadata authoring tools that will be reusable across Earth science data repositories. The tools will be developed as a Drupal profile (GeoDrupal) that can be used by data producers to create/author metadata information for geospatial data sets, either through an easy-to-use, interactive, web-based interface, or by uploading XML definitions. The resulting metadata will be FGDC/ISO compliant. Additionally, this task will investigate the development of metadata translation tools to assist in the conversion of existing metadata to other formats. Several Earth science data centers utilize an internal metadata format that is often useful to have converted to additional standards (i.e. GCMD DIF & SERF, ECHO, FGDC. Etc.) The software will be published and shared at Drupal.org on behalf of the ESIP Federation, making it freely available for deployment at multiple sites. The modules necessary for this functionality will be incrementally designed and implemented under the direction of the IT&I committee.
